Richard...
Wakey, wakey Richard...
Wake up, I want to talk to you Richard.
That’s a good boy.
Now come outside for a chat.
Hello Richard.
Erm...
Hello?
Wait, you’re the sun.
Why am I talking to the sun?
It’s a dream, yes?
I’m not the sun, Richard.
I’m famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Here: my recent book.
Available in Kindle ebook format and all usual bookstores.
What the HELL does this all mean?!
Ah, Richard, don’t you worry – I’m the philosopher.
But YOU are the composer
and I think you could write a great piece based on my novel.
After all, it’s totally reads like a symphony
and you know what I say:
Erm...
I’m not sure about this, Mr Nietzsche, your book’s a bit complicated.
Well how about I guarantee you that in seventy-six years’ time,
a man called Stanley Kubrick will put your music in his Space Odyssey film
and turn you into a global superstar.
Just THINK of the royalties, Richard.
Ah, now you’re talking my language, Mr Nietzsche!
It’s the late 19th century and Nietzsche’s philosophical poem is taking Germany by storm.
It follows the journey of Zarathustra who sets out
to explain humanity’s place in this frightening world.
A mouthpiece for Nietzsche’s own philosophies,
Zarathustra gives us life lessons on all sorts of topics,
each of his gospels ending with the words “Thus spoke Zarathustra”.
Nietzsche’s central idea
is that man is just a temporary state – a bridge between animal and superman.
The meaning of life, Nietzsche argues,
is for man to liberate himself from society’s ways of thinking.
The goal is to reach the self-improved status of the superman, the highest state of evolution.
Few composers would be so brave to write a piece based on such a complex book.
But 32-year-old Richard Strauss brimmed with self-belief.
Germany fancied him as heir to the recently-deceased Wagner and Liszt.
He’d long abandoned traditional musical forms like sonatas and rondos
and was now composing tone poems with rich orchestration and innovative harmonies.
These free-flowing fantasies evoked the images and ideas of other art forms
– be that paintings or poems.
But by choosing Nietzsche’s book,
Strauss radically expanded the usual range of source material.
He composed the work in 1896.
The piece begins with the breaking of dawn.
Double basses, contrabassoon and organ rumble the lowest C the orchestra can muster.
A trumpet fanfare as the sun rises over the mountains.
It’s the theme of nature and symbolises the power of the universe.
Now Zarathustra’s spent the last ten years holed up in his mountain cave.
He’s often watched this awes-inspiring sunrise.
He’s kept up night-after-night, wondering how humanity might justify its existence
in light of nature’s unlimited power.
Today, he’s decided to leave his cave to address the sun.
"Yo, big star."
"Got something to tell ya."
"I’m leaving this mountain from today and going back to humanity."
"I gotta enlighten the people with all my wisdom,"
"just like you’ve lit up my cave over the past ten years."
"Damn right, Zarathustra’s gonna become a man again!"
The sun blazes fiercely to the sound of an impressive C major chord.
Music’s most universal key, it includes only the white notes of the piano.
C is nature at its purest.
As Zarathustra’s descends the mountain to rejoin humankind,
the key changes to B minor, symbolising humanity.
Zarathustra bumps into a religious saint in the woods.
Muted horns intone the Credo from the Roman Catholic Mass: I Believe in One God.
For the saint explains that he’s found a refuge from the sufferings
and imperfections of the mortal world by devoting himself to god.
The strings play an intensely lyrical hymn,
as seductive as the emotional comforts of religious faith.
"Don’t you know"
replies Zarathustra
"that God is dead?"
He explains that humanity in its most primitive state
uses religion to understand the mysteries of the universe.
Strauss shared with Nietzsche this disdain for religion,
believing it to imprison the human spirit and bar man’s evolution towards the superman.
The hymn’s B minor key of humanity is disturbed by the theme of nature in C.
It suggests that humanity’s religious faith cannot dominate nature.
But the saint cannot let go of his desire to be close to god.
To tell us this, the organ plays part of the Magnificat:
the Christian hymn My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord.
Zarathustra suggests an alternative path for humanity.
He says that we should derive meaning not from faith but from nature.
In other words, we should satisfy our inner sensualist
– our basic instincts and erotic desires.
Surely that’s a better way to overcome the world and rise up to superman status?
The music’s key changes to C minor
– a compromise between nature’s C major and humanity’s B minor.
It leaps to great heights as Zarathustra remembers all the joys and passions of his youth.
Ditch religion!
Defy morality!
Relish the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle!
Yeah!
But Zarathustra’s not quite convinced with his solution.
There’s no point living in the past
and, in any case, hindsight has rose-tinted spectacles
– life’s painful as well as joyful,
boring as well as exciting.
In fact, these disapproving trombones tell us that
Zarathustra’s pretty disgusted by the idea of unbridled pleasure-seeking.
Such indulgence will eventually exhaust you
– perhaps even lead to an early death.
Which takes us into The Song of the Grave.
Zarathustra, deluded by both religion and youthful passions,
decides to bury both, metaphorically-speaking.
Neither will help humanity overcome nature and find its way through the abyss of existence.
When Nietzsche wrote his novel in the 1880s, Europe was going through a crisis
because the advance of science was leading people to doubt the value of religion.
So Zarathustra wonders – perhaps SCIENCE can give humanity answers?
So we hear a fugue – the most academic musical form –
that perfectly reflects the intellectual rigours of science.
A fugue is when the orchestra states a short melodic phrase
that’s methodically developed in a complex interweaving pattern.
Strauss now mixes the theme of nature with the theme of humanity.
But the scientific mind is tortuous and turbulent
and gets tangled up in knotty arguments.
It looks like scientific advancement can’t explain the meaning of life either.
So Zarathustra’s has an existential breakdown.
Unable to justify his being alive, he withdraws back to his cave.
He collapses to the sound of the explosive nature theme,
the universe triumphing over humanity.
Silence.
He slowly regains consciousness,
and though he’s too traumatised to rejoin humanity just yet,
Zarathustra IS determined to continue his quest
to solve the riddle of the universe and the path to the superman.
All of sudden he breaks out in laughter, the woodwinds playing some strange special effects.
Ah – to laugh!
Feels good, no?
Feels GREAT.
What a liberty to be free!
Unchained from the guilt-tripping of religion,
released from the shackles of mindboggling science.
Chuckling away, Zarathustra rises to his feet and starts to dance.
To laugh and to dance –
it’s the small things in life that matter!
The theme of nature sounds quietly and out of it emerges a lilting solo violin.
For Zarathustra dances to a rustic Bavarian waltz and becomes one with nature.
One-two-three,
one-two-three.
“Lift up your hearts, my brothers!”
he addresses humanity.
“Higher, higher!"
"And don’t forget your legs either!"
"Lift them as well, you dancers."
"And better yet – stand on your heads too!"
"Learn to laugh, supermen!”
A tingling glockenspiel adds merriment to this life-affirming occasion.
Strauss himself even plays a little joke on us with a full-blown
Viennese waltz that parodies the OTHER Strauss –
the Waltz King Johan Strauss.
The Blue Danube and all that?
The waltz builds to a climax at which point we hear the twelve
chimes of a bell signalling the arrival of midnight –
the moment of ultimate revelation when Zarathustra finally transcends nature.
He now emerges from his cave, dancing up to the cosmos,
a superman who leaves the world sinking far beneath him.
We change to the key of B, reminding us that back on earth,
the rest of humanity’s yearning to be as free as Zarathustra.
The violins climb higher and higher as mankind reaches out to the stars.
As the piece ends, Strauss throws out the harmony textbooks.
He settles those violins on a B chord up high,
but cellos and double basses play nature’s C down below.
It sounds like they’re playing the wrong note because C and B just don’t go together.
It’s a cliff-hanger ending that has baffled listeners ever since it premiered.
The unresolved C and B keys suggest that nature and humanity can never be reconciled
and that sadly the meaning of life will forever be a mystery.
But what we CAN learn from Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra is this:
that if we embrace the full depth of life in the here and now
– both its pleasures and its pains –
and do so free from society’s limiting rules and beliefs,
then one day we might all become supermen.
Thus Spoke Strauss.